Collaborations between Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Rambam Health Care Campus and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology will give rise to synergistic partnerships that will advance cancer diagnosis and therapy

On March 4, 2019, a preliminary face to face meeting took place at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK). In attendance were senior leadership from MSK and Rambam Health Care Campus (RHCC) including Dr. Lisa DeAngelis, Acting Physician-in-Chief & Chief Medical Officer at MSK,  Dr. Michael Halberthal, the director at RHCC, Dr. Yehuda Chowers, head of research affairs at RHCC, Irit Ben-Aharon, director of the division of oncology at RHCC, Dr. Zohar Keidar, director of nuclear medicine at RHCC, and Dr. Yuval Shaked, head of the Technion integrated Cancer Center and a team of senior investigators from the Technion. The project is led by Dr. David Kelsen from MSK and Dr. Ben-Aharon from RHCC.

The purpose of the brainstorming steering committee was to discuss potential collaborations between the institutions. There was strong interest on all sides in the potential development of collaborations between investigators from the three institutions. The meeting yielded several potential domains of multidisciplinary research combining perspectives of computer science, big data analysis, and computational biology on the topics of cancer imaging, inflammation-driven cancers and cancer in unique populations. This trio-collaborative research combines the superb capabilities of MSK in genomics and computational biology, with the unique long-term medical records and biobank of RHCC and well-developed computerized science, big data and artificial analysis of the Technion.

The formed trio-bonding collaboration between the three institutions:  MSK, RHCC and TICC represents a unique large-scale opportunity, and will certainly give rise to expert synergistic partnerships that will advance cancer diagnosis and therapy.